“Women served in all our country’s wars as nurses; why not in other jobs?” That’s what college senior Mary Blakemore asked herself in late 1942, when her father, a World War I veteran, told her about the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which became the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). Mary withdrew from Emory & Henry College in Virginia to become a cryptanalyst in the Pacific, decoding Japanese naval messages. “It was all Top Secret,” she says. “I don’t remember all the details because I buried them so deep 70 years ago, only hypnosis could get them back!”
Why did the army assign you to cryptanalysis?
My linguistic ability: I knew French, Spanish, and German. I started learning French when I was able to talk. Daddy was fluent; he had studied at the University of Bordeaux after World War I. He started his children speaking French while we ate dinner. We were afraid we couldn’t eat if we couldn’t remember the words!
Your father also got you into the army.
On December 6, 1942, he marched me to the recruiting station in Abingdon, Virginia. I was underweight by two pounds. “Keep those papers handy,” Dad told the sergeant. “We’ll be back tomorrow morning.” He bought me half a dozen bananas and a thick steak. I thought I’d explode. But the next morning I met the requirement.
You trained at Vint Hill Farms Station in Virginia.
Only after I had agreed to be frozen in rank as a corporal so I could go overseas, which didn’t seem right. At Vint Hill, 19 of us—librarians, teachers, linguists, and lab technicians—studied cryptanalysis. We learned Hepburn kana—the symbols for converting Japanese characters into syllables; military and naval terminology; and the grammatical structures we’d find in their messages. It was fascinating but didn’t have much to do with Japanese itself. What we did was pick up certain words the Japanese used in coded trans missions to ships sailing from Tokyo to wherever, so the ships could be intercepted.
A month-long voyage on the SS Lurline took you to New Guinea.
We landed at Oro Bay, then at Hollandia, where we were in a tent city, all women. We had boa constrictors in our barracks, and had to shake our boots each morning to get tarantulas and small reptiles out of them. We had our own facilities, showers and so on, on GHQ Hill—General MacArthur’s head quarters. I never saw him, even at church. GIs were so happy to see American women they tried everything to entice us on dates. Some got drunk and wanted more than a date; so did some WACs. The rest of us accepted meal or movie offers, and met in the rec room. Sometimes we put on Ping Pong tournaments. I had a portable organ I played for church services; some fellas made a choir.
What was your typical workday like?
There were three shifts—54 of us, 18 to a shift. After showers and breakfast, we went down the hill to Quonset huts that were very primitive: no bathrooms, two rows of small desks like old school desks. Two of us sat at each one. We had pencils with erasers. Each day, we were presented with a paper that looked like a crossword puzzle and given numbers in blocks of four. We had to translate them and figure out what they meant. We used kana words. The most important were maru—“a ship”— and bakugeki—“to bomb.” We started with the most frequently used letter, A; Os and As were the key. We shuffled the vowels in different columns, then put in consonants, trying to find maru. Then we had to figure out the timing and points of departure and destination.
It sounds like a lot of trial and error.
Oh, yes. We worked it and worked it and worked it. My partner might find a word but need a consonant, and I’d say, “Hey, it looks like that one right there.” That’s why we worked as teams. At the end of a day, the papers we hadn’t solved were gathered up and given to the next shift.
Did the Japanese change codes often while you were a cryptanalyst?
Several times, usually after ships were bombed. Then they decided to try another tactic. One night Tokyo Rose said on the radio she knew those people on GHQ Hill were breaking their codes, and the women were the worst. So we had to be…well, bakugeki—bombed. The first broadcast, she made mewling noises: “Oooh, you poor girls.” We laughed. Next broadcast, she says, “Don’t you girls know that there is a life for you in the States with privileges and luxury? Go tell them you’ve had enough!” Next broadcast, she says, “We’re going to bakugeki you!” She even gave us the date and time. How stupid!
What happened?
That night, our fellas got ready to defend the base. Most of the women were scared, and went down into a ravine near the bar racks. I didn’t; too many creepy-crawly things. I’d had enough boa constrictors and tarantulas and reptiles. So I said my prayers and went to sleep singing “Do Not Be Afraid,” a hymn. I slept like a baby. When I woke up, everything was fine. The other girls meandered back dirty and grumpy. The fellas had turned the Japanese planes back. We knew our work was succeeding: the Japanese didn’t try to bomb anybody at Hollandia but us!
Next stop—San Miguel in the Philippines. Were you bombed again?
No. The fighting was farther north, but we still had to be escorted everywhere by a soldier. One morning we heard scream after scream from the bathhouse. MPs came running. The trembling girl pointed to this dirty, petrified man in a Japanese uniform who was at least as scared as she was. He’d come down from the mountains because he had seen his country’s flag on a smokestack in the camp—our fellas hadn’t had time to paint over it—and thought he’d be safe. He sure got that wrong!
Soon afterward you were evacuated to Clark Field. Why?
At Hollandia I cut my right foot swimming, and it was seeping. For a couple of months, I just cut out the top of my shoe and went about my business, but it got so bad I figured I’d better go on sick call. They sent me to the hospital at Clark Field, where they treated me with gentian violet and elevated my leg. It didn’t work. I read and I slept, and I slept and I read. Then my first cousin, Bobby Wysor, who I loved dearly, came looking for me. Bobby was a captain with the 33rd Infantry on Luzon. He arranged for the doctors to release me so I could meet him at a Red Cross camp after he reported back to his battalion. But when I went to San Miguel to pick up clothes, I found everyone had been ordered to a camp south of Manila to be shipped home.
What did you do?
I strolled out of there. Everything was in confusion. I found a road north of town and thumbed a ride. A GI driver kindly took me in his 10-ton truck to the camp to meet Bobby; I fell asleep on his shoulder. I went swimming in the South China Sea, which was gorgeous, with clear warm water. After a few days, my foot healed— the salt must have done it. I went to meet my detachment south of Manila. The entire city was rubble except for the beautiful cathedral and the hotel where MacArthur had his HQ. In December 1945, we sailed to San Francisco on the Lurline, the same ship that brought us to New Guinea.
What was your reunion with your father like?
After I enlisted, he reenlisted and, since he was a lawyer, ended up in AMG [Allied Military Government]. He went into French and Belgian villages after the fighting and established law and order. He didn’t get home till after I did. I went back to college, and in June 1946, graduated with my younger sister Martha. We were in line when the college president announced, “We have just learned that Mr. Blakemore is home, and we would like to have him give his daughters their certificates.” It was wonderful. Dad came down the aisle, blowing his nose. He gave Martha her diploma and a sweet kiss. To me, he said, “Well, Mary, it’s about time!”
Originally published in the August 2014 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
